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“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... and time horizons – and a quite extraordinary proliferation of specialist journals. David Cannadine, in an influential but pessimistic article, has argued that this is a sign of the subject’s decadence: that it involves knowing more and more about less and less. I prefer to see it as a sign of history’s generosity, and its readiness to ...”

“... lithe, an inspired mimic. Everyone who met him, even those who disliked him, felt his vitality. David ‘Bunny’ Garnett noticed his ‘beautiful lively, blue eyes’, and that he was ‘very light in his movements’. He also maintained that Lawrence’s hair colour, or non-colour – it was reddish-fair – was characteristically working-class. When a ...”

“... will starve to death if we take out from the country whatever we need.’ It was written by Herbert Backe, state secretary of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture. While the memo left the number of victims blank, Backe’s arithmetic suggested that the entire urban population of the European Soviet Union – thirty million ‘surplus ...”

“... in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking islands of environmental purity. The adjective ‘wild’, once applied to the savage creatures and barbarous landscapes of postlapsarian nature, has been reduced to a mark of culinary approbation. In Ruth Pavey’s ...”

“... criticised Coates’s ideas, from a variety of positions.* He treats Marcel Duchamp, New Labour, Herbert Marcuse and US affirmative action policies as if they are all part of the same continuous trend. More important, Kaufmann gives too little consideration to the difference between top-down initiatives – the celebration of diversity in advertising ...”

“... of blessings’ – the title of the novel she appears in. (The quotation is borrowed from George Herbert, one of Pym’s favourite poets.) Gently mocking self-love, Pym’s novels find redemption in commonplace pleasures – though without sanctimony. ‘The trivial round, the common task,’ Belinda repeats from Keble’s hymn ‘New Every Morning Is the ...”

“... his younger brother Hamo at Gallipoli and his beloved ‘poor Tommy’, his fellow Welch Fusilier David Thomas – nourished his Homeric rage, which, in a uniquely Sassoonian way, led him to take the whole burden of war on himself as a kind of cosmic personal insult:I want to smash someone’s skull; I want to have a scrap and get out of the war for a bit or ...”

“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. ...”

“... the secrets behind better Bombs. Success in achieving either, as the physicist and historian David Kaiser has argued, depended on resolving a problem about secrecy that was at once philosophical and political. If scientific and technological knowledge was crucial, did it come in discrete units, some of which needed special protection while others were ...”

“... woman universally admired, a diamond geezer, should prove capable of creating such an unmitigated herbert. Dalgleish peaked early in a landscape James caught as well as any mainstream novelist: Ely, the Suffolk coast, bleakness everywhere. Empty churches, disappointed lives. Modest Sapphic alliances, inactive adulterers, and, representing hope, some feisty ...”

“... Dylan’s ‘barbed-wire tonsils’ (Ian Hamilton’s words), his ‘voice like sand and glue’ (David Bowie’s). ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Ricks says in his chapter on ‘Pride’, is saved ‘from being – in all its vituperative exhilaration – even more damnably proud than the person whom it damns and blasts . . . There can be felt in the refrain an ...”

“... beers’ at a bar, in a conversation between Robert Swanson, a 29-year-old venture capitalist, and Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. Working with the Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen, Boyer had helped to develop some elegant recombinant DNA technologies which immediately suggested enormous value to the pharmaceutical ...”

“... Ellison like to make lists of the amazing prodigies that flowed to him from his single novel. David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker in 1994, noted the ‘National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, a place in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a position at New York University as ...”

“... for originality in their narratives, so why should she?Acker also claimed to have studied with Herbert Marcuse at the University of California at San Diego, but that doesn’t seem to have been true either. In fact she dropped out of Brandeis after two years to follow her boyfriend, Bob Acker, to UCSD, marrying him in the process. That’s just what you ...”